The present invention relates to a route planning system, more particularly to a route planning method and apparatus, for agricultural work vehicles, for example for a combine or harvester-thresher, having a definite working width on a field.
Since the operating efficiency of agricultural work vehicles is to be increased, the usage plan/organization of the work for a high-performance work vehicle, such as a combine, and also other agricultural work vehicles including a fertilizer spreader, sowing work vehicle, field chopper, mower, tedder, swath-forming work vehicle, and the like, is of ever increasing significance. Only a limited number of harvesting hours are available during the grain harvest due to weather conditions, which often are not used in an optimum way because of a poor usage plane. Also a precise usage plan is important for other agricultural work vehicles in order to achieve the theoretical efficiency of the work vehicle also in practice.
A method for fertilizing agriculturally useful surfaces using work vehicles, which are equipped with a GPS satellite receiver for position determination, is described in German Patent Application 43 42 171. The travel path to be covered is prepared and displayed on a control monitor for the driver together with the momentary position of the working work vehicle. Thus the driver can check at an time, whether the field region worked up to now is error-free, which means worked without omission of some parts, or whether certain field regions have still not been worked. This system provides the current knowledge of field working errors, whereby the time required for an expensive search for errors and correction of them is saved. However a usage plan for optimizing work vehicle duty is not possible with this process.